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Opinion

Opinion

Based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events.

Why ‘speak no ill of the dead’ shouldn’t apply to Margaret Thatcher.

By Paul Saurette and Marc Saurette

Thu., April 18, 2013

This week, with union jacks flying and a procession through London, Margaret Thatcher’s funeral took place at St. Paul’s at an estimated cost of $15 million. It is an appropriate culmination to a weeklong binge of hagiography that saw conservatives tripping over each other to offer the most glowing posthumous portraits.

How should those who dispute her legacy respond?

Many assert we should remain silent, obeying the dictate of “speaking no ill of the dead.” This is wrong. The very nature of democratic politics demands that we speak out. Anything less reduces politics to idolatry and allows death to be used as a cover for ideological construction.

Hagiography, the writing of celebratory biographies of saints, has existed since at least the birth of Christianity as the Church worked to codify and harmonize its many heterodox doctrines and practices. Hagiology, the modern study of these texts, is an equally fascinating area of research that has shown that hagiographies usually reveal more about the writer and their context than about the original subject. This is because hagiographies are profoundly political texts.

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In medieval Catholicism, for example, they were pedagogical tools that used simple and compelling exemplary moral portraits to engage a mass audience little interested in the details of theological reasoning. They were also tools used to vilify and dismiss contending schools of thought within the church and to establish the author’s perspective as the authoritative historical memory and orthodoxy.

So it’s unsurprising that modern political movements continue to use the death of their champions for their ideological purposes. It is now done at light speed, in real time (actually, in pre-time, since obits are now written well before the fact). But the overall function of modern hagiography remains very similar to its precursors.

Take, for example, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel’s short tribute to Thatcher in Parliament this week. In three concise paragraphs, she explicitly defined core conservative values (equality as hard-scrabble meritocracy, state intervention as unacceptable), the proper style of conservative politics (unyielding ideological principle rather than debate, compassion and compromise), and skewered political rivals (the NDP’s “yoke of managerial socialism,” Trudeau’s “cotton-candy rhetoric” and popularity politics).

Given its transparent purpose, it might seem that political hagiography is empty fluff with little real impact. This is wrong. Political hagiography, in fact, is an effective and important prong in the multi-faceted construction of modern ideologies.

As an ideological practice, political hagiography has many advantages. Scholars refer to hagiography as a literary genre because there are certain repeated patterns in the way they represent their subject. Sheer repetition may seem too simplistic to be persuasive. But contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology are proving what rhetoricians, poets, and marketers have known for millennia: repetition works. We are more likely to accept without question something that appears familiar – even if it is only the form that feels familiar. This is truer than ever today with an internationalized media that repeats the same structure and story again and again, in multiple formats.

The power of hagiography derives also from the fact that it personalizes ideological commitments and puts them in a narrative form. Again, contemporary neuroscience has confirmed that storytelling is a far more effective form of persuasion than logical argumentation or statistical presentation. This isn’t a function of one’s level of education or “intelligence.” It is a function of how the human brain has evolved to process information. Hagiography capitalizes on this by fusing political ideals to the personal story of a political figure – bringing these ideals to life and offering stark “proof” of their validity. “If Margaret Thatcher, daughter of a grocer, could become the PM on her own, why can’t the rest of them?” This gives political ideas an emotional authenticity and immediacy that greatly increases their power.

Hagiography is an especially convincing ideological tool not only because it denies being ideological (“this isn’t about politics, it is about the life and death of a person”) but also because it takes generally accepted norms around death (be generous in praise) and exaggerates them for political effect. In medieval Christianity, it was an opportunity to convey the influence of God in human affairs. Today, the hero is not God, but the individual – usually of humble roots, but possessing an extraordinary level of virtue that explains and justifies their exceptional achievements. This adds an emotional power to the ideas at play that make them that much more persuasive.

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How should we react to these hagiographical representations? On one hand, the dictate “speak no ill of the dead” is a commonly accepted practice in the case of private citizens. Many have indignantly demanded that this should hold true for major political figures like Thatcher too.

But to leave unchallenged the clear duplicity of political hagiographies in the name of “good taste” is completely inappropriate when it comes to major public figures.

Of the many sacrifices that one makes for public office, perhaps the greatest of all is the fact that your death, like your life, may not be primarily yours. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt has shown, this was well understood by the ancient Greek and Roman innovators of democratic politics. For them, to be a public political figure was to come as close to immortality as one could in the earthly world. For although your body dies, the ripples of your political actions and political persona live on and can have effects that are much greater than the deeds accomplished during a lifetime. Being a public figure means that your death inevitably triggers both a collective evaluation of the political impact of your life and a contest to define its posthumous political impact.

In this context, praising the dead isn’t simply good manners. It does active ideological work, determining the future historical memory in ways that favour particular political movements. Similarly, critiquing a legacy and body of work is not personal disrespect. The death of an important public figure is a crucial moment in the ongoing ideological contest that is democratic politics.

This reality may make many people uncomfortable. But it is not too much to ask of our major political figures. To choose to enter the public realm, to accept the privilege of exercising great political influence, one must agree to exit it under the same conditions. Public political figures will be, and should be, treated as political figures in life and in death. This may cost the individual and their families. But the cost of not doing this is far greater.

Paul Saurette is an associate professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa. His column appears every second Thursday on thestar.com. You can follow him on twitter @paulsaurette. Marc Saurette is an associate professor in the Department of History, Carleton University.

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